Movies

Oscars a sign of ‘rising’ adult audience?

Request to buy this photoWeinstein Co.??Among the Oscar-
nominated films that put adult viewers in theater seats, clockwise from top left:
Silver Linings Playbook,
Lincoln,
Life of Pi and
Les Miserables

For years, the studios have fixated on young men in their teens and 20s — serving up big-budget
popcorn movies populated with dazzling visual effects, comic-book heroes and high-voltage action
sequences.

They’ve also made films designed to win awards, but oftentimes those pictures yield prestige
without huge financial returns.

In this Oscar season, however, six of the nine best-picture nominees earned more than $100
million at the domestic box office. That could lead Hollywood to green-light more projects aimed at
sophisticated audiences, filmmakers and studio executives say.

“That we’re not (just) making movies for teenagers anymore is kind of cool.”

The lesson from the awards season seems to be that people 40 and older will go to the movies
when given something to see.

The slate of best-picture nominees included
Lincoln,
Les Miserables and
Silver Linings Playbook, all of which resonated with older filmgoers. The winner,
Argo, was seen by many as a throwback to the movies of the 1970s.

“It does encourage the next opportunity to take that leap of faith,” said Fox Filmed
Entertainment Chairman Jim Gianopulos, discussing his studio’s
Life of Pi, a financial and creative risk that won four Oscars and has grossed almost $600
million worldwide.

The success of many of the nominated films was driven by adults, an audience segment that has a
long history of going to the movies.

Older moviegoers “are a very reliable segment of the audience that typically still has a fairly
high incidence of moviegoing — it is part of their social fabric,” said

Doug Belgrad, president of Columbia Pictures, the Sony Pictures Entertainment unit that released
Zero DarkThirty.

According to a study by the Motion Picture Association of America, in 2011, 3.1 million people
50 to 59 saw a film once a month or more — up slightly from a year earlier. And, although the study
found that the number of frequent moviegoers 40 to 49 declined during the same period, those in the
25-to-39 age group rose significantly, from 7.7 million to 9.7 million a year earlier.

With roughly 76 million Americans born during the baby boom years of 1946 to 1964, this group —
a large swath of whom are now empty nesters with more leisure time — could be further tapped by
studios to great gain. But not if they don’t make the kind of movies that compel older adults to
leave the comfort of their living rooms.

Still, popcorn fare isn’t going away.

“We will always be mired in sequels and remakes,” said film marketing veteran Russell
Schwartz.

Although any real shift in executives’ choices might take a couple of years to become apparent
because of the laborious moviemaking process, insiders are already eyeing which upcoming 2013
releases could be both critical and box-office successes. Among them are DreamWorks Studios’
The Fifth Estate, director Bill Condon’s film about WikiLeaks; Columbia Pictures’
The Monuments Men, a World War II thriller that George Clooney will star in and direct;
and Martin Scorsese’s
The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Adam Goodman, president of the Paramount Film Group, said that in years past, his studio would
have made a movie like the Oscar-nominated
Flight, which cost the company just $30 million, but the budget would have been two or
three times higher.

“We know the audience is there for that kind of movie,” he said. “The challenge is to adjust the
budgets.”